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The Forum is one the most important parts of this site. The success of the Forum is tightly bound up with the success of the whole site. I want the Forum to thrive, I want smart people to come and have smart debates about important issues.

If you have any ideas about how the Forum can be improved please email me or post your suggestions on the Forum itself.

Avatars (personal pictures/photographs)

The Forum allows users to associate an avatar with all their postings. This can help to make your identity easier to remember. Naturally you are welcome (and encouraged) to use a simple photograph of yourself but that is not the only option.

Please bear in mind that the Forum allows pictures of up to 80 pixels by 80, and up to a maximum of 5 KB. You can upload such images directly to be housed on the Forum.

You should be able to save a photograph at 80 x 80 pixels in either 24 bit colour or greyscale (slightly smaller file) JPEG format at less than 3 KB. Try experimenting with compression settings. DO NOT save photographs as GIF format, even greyscale pictures, the idea that because a GIF file can contain up to 256 colours it is sensible to use for monochrome photographs is a widespread and damaging myth. GIF format is suitable for images with small numbers of colours and large blocks of colour, basically cartoons usually work best (i.e. smallest file size) as GIF while photographs are almost always better as JPEG (.jpg in Windows). Crossword puzzles compress wonderfully using GIF format, photographs compress best with JPEG. For an image that is going to be used many times by many people an experiment is best to prove the matter, try saving your image in a variety of formats. When saving GIF images further file size economy can be gained by saving the image with exactly the minimum number of colours required. If your program will allow you to count the number of colours do so, if there are only 6 colours in the image resample and save it at 6 colours, do not accept the default of 256 or even 16, unused colour definitions bloat the file up and offer no advantage.

Do not use animated images for your avatar.
It's not big and it's not clever.

If you want me to host your image file just ask. I will even help make one for you if you want, just tell me what you want and I will see what I can come up with. Also if you don't want to be bothered with the technicalities of image optimization I can do that for you as well, just email the image you want to use.

Posting your Avatar image

Make sure you are logged in. Then click on Profile.

Then paste the URL of the image file in the appropriate box at the bottom of the page.

Uploading

You can now also directly upload your image from your own computer, just follow the prompts.

*@‼%‡§~¿* Banned Words

The forum has facilities to ban certain words. This facility is not used to censor “profane language”. A good writer should use profanity like exclamation marks, sparingly, to good effect. Excessive bad language will result in censure. Please do not self-censor. If you intend to say that George Bush is a a fucking wanker do so. The use of asterisks to “clean up” language only draws more attention to it, the moderators are under instruction to replace all asterisked words with either the word that was clearly intended or with a nonsense word, whichever seems funnier at the time.

© 1999 - 2008 by Martin Willett.

mwillett.org: Debate Unlimited